The Routledge Companion to the Geography of International Business

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INTERNATIONAL KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

Yan Wu and Yong Yang

Introduction

The traditional literature on multinational corporations (MNCs) emphasises that the parent company is regarded as the prime source of technological capability and know-how that its subsidiaries can exploit when operating in foreign markets (Vernon, 1966; Dunning, 1988). In this literature, knowledge and technology are transferred primarily from the parent company to its overseas subsidiaries.

Increasingly, there are both theoretical and empirical emphases that each foreign subsidiary in a given country has its own strategic task (Gupta & Govindarajan, 1991, 1994; Cantwell, 1995; Birkinshaw, 1997; Rugman & Verbeke, 2001; Harzing & Noorderhaven, 2006), and because of these ...